The Global West: Other Wests and Indian Wars, 1919–1945

Kakel, Carroll P.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_6

Carroll P. Kakel III²

175 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter looks at how the earlier North American precedent—especially its brutal treatment of Indian peoples—served as inspiration, legitimation, and model for two mid-twentieth-century imperial-colonial projects. Specifically, it sketches the historical experiences of the Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 and the Nazi-German East European Empire, 1939–1945—noting how contemporaries viewed each of these similar imperial-colonial projects through the lens of the Anglo-American settler-colonial supplanting project. In both of the cases surveyed, it also discusses the inspiration provided by an American-like national myth of God-given destiny and the usage and significance of the Anglo-American colonial trope of Indian wars.

We [are] living in an age of economic empires in which the primitive urge to colonization was again manifesting itself.

Adolf Hitler (1937, Friedrich Hossbach, ‘Hossbach Memorandum’, 10 November 1937, Minutes of the Conference in the Reich Chancellery, 5 November 1937, reprinted in Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945: The Chronicle of a Dictatorship, Volumes One–Four, trans. Mary Fran Gilbert and ed. Max Domarus. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990 [1962], Volume Two: The Years 1935–1938, pp. 962–972)

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Notes

1.
Herwig, The Demon of Geopolitics, 144.
2.
Hossbach, ‘Hossbach Memorandum’.
3.
Like historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki, I understand fascism as a modern global phenomenon, focused on a basic compatibility between the Italian , Japanese, and German historical experiences. And like Yoshimi, I emphasize the central role of imperialism and empire in the making of fascism and World War II , a war whose origins are best understood in the broader, longer-term context of ‘competing imperialisms’. See Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), especially Ethan Mark, ‘Translator’s Introduction: The People in the War’, 1–39.
4.
Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, ‘Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age’, in Rethinking American History in the Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 81.
5.
Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro: A Political Biography, trans. Shumpei Okamoto and Patricia Murray (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1983), 10–12.
6.
Sandra Wilson, ‘The “New Paradise”: Japanese Emigration to Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s’, The International History Review 17, no. 2 (1995): 250.
7.
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 26–27.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Roger H. Brown, ‘Visions of a Virtuous Manifest Destiny: Yasuoka Masahiro and Japan’s “Kingly Way”’, in Pan-Asianism and Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism, and Borders, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 140–141, 150.
10.
Pike, Hirohito’s War, 52.
11.
In his annual message to Congress, in December 1823, President James Monroe had warned European imperial-colonial powers to stay out of the Americas (North and South) and had declared the western hemisphere to be a rightful US sphere of influence. Over time, the ‘Monroe Doctrine ’ was invoked by numerous US politicians to meet the needs of an expanding American empire—on the North American continent , in the western hemisphere, and around the world. At the Paris Peace Conference, when the Americans successfully pushed for a reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, there was, in fact, fear that the Japanese might demand an equivalent doctrine for Japan. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 96.
12.
Quoted in Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War, 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 51–52.
13.
Ibid., 96.
14.
Christian W. Sprang, ‘Karl Haushofer Re-examined: Geopolitics as a Factor of Japanese-German Rapprochement in the Inter-War Years’, in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy, and Public Opinion, eds. Christian W. Sprang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 146–148.
15.
Keiichi Takeuchi, ‘Japanese Geopolitics in the 1930s and 1940s’, in Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, eds. Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 75, 84.
16.
Quoted in Francis Pike, Empires at War: A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 85.
17.
Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1999), 4.
18.
See Wilson, ‘The “New Paradise”’, The International History Review, 249–286.
19.
Quoted in Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 98.
20.
Quoted in ibid., 105.
21.
J. Victor Koschmann, ‘Constructing Destiny: Rōyama Masamichi and Asian Regionalism in Wartime Japan’, in Pan-Asianism and Modern Japanese History, ed. Saaler and Koschmann, 189.
22.
Quoted in Bradley, Imperial Cruise, 318–319.
23.
On Japan’s fascist empire, see Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, ed., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
24.
Wilson, ‘The “New Paradise”’, The International History Review, 249–250.
25.
Ibid., 251–268, 283.
26.
Pike, Hirohito’s War, 54.
27.
For a study which documents and details instances of genocidal violence perpetrated by the Japanese military between 1937 and 1945, see Kelly Maddox, ‘“The Strong Devour the Weak”: Tracing the Genocidal Dynamics of Violence in the Japanese Empire’ (PhD Thesis, Lancaster University, 2016).
28.
On Japanese war crimes during the Asia-Pacific War , see Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). For a more recent overview of Japanese wartime brutality, in the context of Japanese ideologies of race , see Mark Felton, ‘The Perfect Storm: Japanese Military Brutality during World War II’, in The Routledge History of Genocide, ed. Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 105–121.
29.
Jones, Genocide, 100–102.
30.
Felton, ‘The Perfect Storm’, 107.
31.
Quoted in Pike, Hirohito’s War, 51.
32.
Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945, Volume 1, The Rise to Power 1919–1934 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 14–15.
33.
Herwig, The Demon of Geopolitics, 90–102, 112–114.
34.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, Mariner Books Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 139, 286, 304, 646. While not an admirer of contemporary American culture, or of its allegedly Jewish-dominated, liberal political system, Hitler , nonetheless, believed that ‘the Americans have one thing that is becoming lost to us, a feeling for the wide-open spaces. Hence our longing to extend our space’. Hitler monologue, 13 October 1941, quoted in David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 293.
35.
Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, trans. Krista Smith, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), 105, 109, 113. While Hitler’s Second Book was never published in his lifetime, its content was the basis for many of his speeches in the 1920s and 1930s.
36.
Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II 1937–1939 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), xii.
37.
Hitler, Second Book, 152. As a frontier myth, geopolitical fantasy, and colonial construct, ‘the East’, in the modern period, potentially included Poland, the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Ukraine, Russia , the Czech lands, the Balkans, and the eastern provinces and borderlands of Germany itself (Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, 1800 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3).
38.
Hossbach, ‘Hossbach Memorandum’.
39.
Hermann Griesler, Ein Anderer Hitler: Bericht Seines Architekten Hermann Griedler (Druffel-Verlag, 1978), 374–375.
40.
Quoted in Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, Volume 2: The Establishment of the New Order (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), 327.
41.
Hitler’s speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, 18 December 1940, reprinted in Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, Volume Three: The Years 1939 to 1940, ed. Domarus, 2161–2171.
42.
Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 658.
43.
An avid reader of history, Hitler ‘would turn to historical precedent both for understanding the world and for devising policies for the future’ (Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 85). To be sure, a large, shared Euro-American colonial archive was available to Nazi leaders, ideologues, propagandists, and planners. For his own part, Hitler admired the British empire, envied modern Italian fascist colonialism , and was inspired by Turkey’s eradication of the Armenians from the Turkish national body. But, above all, it was the North American precedent—the most successful settler-colonial project in history—which was foundational for Hitler’s obsessive spatial fantasies, fantasies which drove the various genocidal projects originating from Hitler’s colonial wars for Lebensraum in Poland and the Soviet Union . For an elaboration of this argument, see Carroll P. Kakel, III, The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
44.
Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens and ed. H.R. Trevor-Roper (New York: Enigma Books, 2008), 17 October 1941, 55.
45.
Quoted in James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 9. This quote is from a 1928 Hitler speech; the ‘cage’ reference is to twentieth-century American Indian survivors of the Indian wars still imprisoned in ‘cages’ on federal Indian reservations .
46.
Hitler, Table Talk, 8 August 1942, 469.
47.
Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 434–435.
48.
Hitler, Table Talk, 11 April 1942, 321.
49.
Ibid., 12 May 1942, 353.
50.
The phrase is Ian Kershaw’s. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (Jerusalem, Yad Vashem: International Institute for Holocaust Research and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 373.
51.
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 254.
52.
Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
53.
Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3.
54.
Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 236–237.
55.
Karl Korsch, ‘Notes on History: The Ambiguities of Totalitarian Ideologies’, New Essays 6, no. 2 (1942), 3.
56.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
57.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 123–125.
58.
For support for this view, see Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 412.

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Carroll P. Kakel III

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Kakel, C.P. (2019). The Global West: Other Wests and Indian Wars, 1919–1945. In: A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_6
Published: 17 August 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21304-6
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